Lauren pryde

Lauren Pryde is an upcoming Artist, and recent First Class BA (hons) Graduate of The University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. As well as being a free-lance Artist.She is interested in experiencing and experimenting what Art has to offer, and in doing so, trying to create something new.

She grew up on an Island named 'The Isle of Sheppey' which, along with having a fishermen dad, influenced her interest in painting and developing sculptures based on the Romantism of the sea and the ever ignored subject of sea pollution.Which in turn, opened up a new world to Lauren - the art world - a world which she would pursue as a career.

She has also been longlisted for the 2016 CRATE Graduate Project Space Award.

The picture plane is the plane of flatness which lies in correspondence to the surfaces of a picture. In traditional illusionistic painting, the Old Masters used the picture plane as an observation to produce illusions. The picture plane was thought of a hypothetical looking-glass, which allows the viewer to look into the depicting reality that lies beyond the painting, in turn, permitting the artist to achieve representation. However, in Modern Art, the picture plane became a concern through works in the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Donald Judd in the 1960s, the crux point had articulated. The era of the surface had begun. A painting is a flatbed on the picture plane, for the sake of truth, should we not pretend it to be anything other than flat? No illusion of three-dimensions within a painting – trompe l’oeil (deceiving the eye). The elements of the image ought to be located on the picture plane.

“Sculpture is surface in space-possessing ground. Surface is inevitably color - if only the color of the untreated surface. Sculpture is colored surface. Nonetheless, to be meaningful as colored surface, the work must-from beginning to end - be achieved in terms of sculptural shape. Colored surface and sculptural shape move together in space. Unlike painting, sculpture need not be available in one glance, need not be read in its entirety from any one point of view.” (Moffett, 1977:1)

Sculpture involves the activity of going around and around coloured surface at all viewing points, in conjunction to painting, which tends to be a single visual experience, making sculpture a more abstract thought in terms of the surface, but not incomprehensible. The addition of colour to a functioning part of the said sculpture, brings our awareness back to the surface and in turn, also implying its Objecthood.

Jules Olitski and Donald Judd were present influences throughout Laurens practice. Olitski – the colour field artist – and his iridescent colours soaked into the canvas created shapes that seem largely in relation to bio-morphism and his staining automatically allowed for unremitting material flatness. Judd painted his objects his chosen colour which became an essential element of the individual material becoming united with its surface.

Lauren found herself loathing the frame after framing six paintings and finding that the frame interfered incredibly with my initial intensions with the surface. Are we not rejecting the surface of a painting by framing it? She made several paintings and sculptures which were heavily related to the rejection of the frame – parodying it and its functionality. This lead me to a begin a series titled ‘Any Frame will do’, which entailed Perspex boxes being functioned as shelves with deconstructed frames place atop. However, Lauren realised the frame itself wasn’t necessary for the format of my work - and Eleka Nahman Nahman begun.